1
WHERE HAVE ALL THE FLOWERS GONE?
THE FUTURE FOR ACADEMICS.
Pauline Collins
Change the way you look at things and the things you look at change Albert Einstein Creating space for reflection and creativity is problematic in the new corporatised university. This chapter explores the concepts of the ‘technopreneurial’ or ‘militarized knowledge factory’ of the privatising public university and what that means for the future of universities. Adopting aspects of resistance theory and notions from creativity theory this chapter aims to generate vision for ways to break the mould of a constraining neoliberalised space. Ideas for community, including using Community of Practice concepts, and other creative responses are proposed as possibilities to disrupt the drive to produce slaves of production. The creation of reflection time, pleasure and personal wellbeing for academics and why this might be essential are addressed?
INTRODUCTION
Giroux (2006, p.8) likens the post 9/11 American university to a militarised knowledge factory. Isaac Cordal (Wang, 2015) an artist, captures this in his miniature installations which depict factory-like settings, but in which no items are actually produced. The industrial setting of rows of white lab-coated middle aged men engaged in busy work conjures a sterile, pointless environment in which students and academics have become slaves of production. Skeletal overlords supervise the industry in which universities are now a business and students [have turned] into customers.
2 The political philosophy of Hayek (1952) underpins the public management model in which autonomy is highly constrained by externally defined goals, increasing social control, and reducing academic freedom. A radical critical break is required, but is difficult to birth.
Neoliberalism has become the reinforced norm in the current university discourse. While the
term itself is dominant in describing the current economic political approach of Western states,
its ubiquitous nature requires some clarification. The following provides a useful definition of
neoliberalism:
[It is] in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that
human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial
freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private
property rights, free markets and free trade. (Baron 2004 p. 274 citing Harvey 2005
p.2).
The marketing rhetoric overflows into all domains delivering a creeping sameness not unlike
that seen in any military. Huntington (1957) portrayed a vision of military values that he
suggests civil society would be better to align with. Such values are ‘pessimistic, collectivist,
historically inclined, power-oriented, nationalistic, militaristic ... in brief…conservative...’
(p.68). This black and white binary view enables the otherness of alienation, and exclusion of
difference, developing insider and outsider dichotomies in a militarisation of the civil.
Hayek’s belief that there is nothing new to be discovered or imagined, and that all theory is just reconstructing existing knowledge, leaves little for academics to be doing in the critical thinking space, and presents a challenge for researchers and PhD students who are required to add new knowledge (Marginson, 2009). The drive for change produced by neoliberalism creates a futile pursuit and by its endorsement of coercion of the social order ironically leads to high levels of uniformity. Like the cat chasing its tail, the Hayekian neoliberal world relies on a circularity produced by three false beliefs. First, a naturalising of competitive economic markets; second, the politics of state driven markets; and third, that the human drive for wealth and personal gain predicts human reaction to market signals (Hayek, 1952; 1979). There are assumptions in this that leave little room for other values, or scope for a reflecting and self-determining agenda.
Giroux (2006) sees the current plight of the academe as: ‘an ideological war against liberal
3 precondition for extending and expanding the promise of an inclusive democracy’ (p.4). In this
vision academics become mere cogs in the wheel of capitalist production. The urgency for
disruption and space for academics to pushback, resist and open room for pleasurable
intellectual pursuit and sustaining of democratic ideals is apparent. Giroux (2006) suggests the
neoliberal ideology of the Right in the US dominates. The election of President Trump
providing some credence to this claim, signalling the endgame of these ideals. The drive to unity is supported by hierarchical command and control concepts found in the military (Saltman, 2007). The spectre that Eisenhower warned against, regarding the power of the
industrial–military complex is re-envisioned by Giroux. Eisenhower (1961)said:
We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can
compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense
with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
Marginson (2009) describes the new public management model as providing benefits for a privileged few. Thornton (2009) refers to the heroes it produces as the ‘technoprenuers’ combining technological and scientific knowledge, with business acumen (p.388). This new public management model is seen as suppressing university autonomy, academic criticism, free inquiry and creativity. Marginson (2009) argues this occurs through the channelling and limiting process by which academics are tamed to economic or market interests (outputs) and state control. Preferring the term ‘academic self-determination’, Marginson (2009) suggests what is lost in this process is space for critique and creativity (p.87). The need for freedom, or the capacity for the radical critical break, described by Marginson as vital, does not occur.
This chapter poses a number of issues and possibilities for university academics struggling in a managerial neoliberal world to find purpose, creativity, pleasure and excitement in their work. The issues in the ‘technopreneurial’ ‘militarized knowledge factory’ of the privatising public university are considered (Saltman, 2007). What might be some of the disruptions needed in order to provide for creative reflection time and personal wellbeing for academics and why is this essential? This chapter introduces some suggestions based on creativity theory (Agamben,
1995), psychology (Jung, 1967), the politics of difference (Young, 1986) and resistance theory
4 WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?
Thornton (2009) recalls the history of the university in three phases. The first was ‘Modernisation’, when the early 1800s saw Von Humboldts – bourgeois’ revolutionary education create a rational, universal, secular and enlightened – liberal university in which freedom to inquire permitted the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake (p.377). The second
phase arose during the late 20th century with the second wave of feminism which sought to transform the nature of knowledge and structures of power. Women disrupted the established social order by revealing how denigration of the ‘other,’ being women, enabled the sustaining of male power. In turn this led to postmodernism, concerned with deconstruction of notions of truth, neutrality and universalism (p.379). This critique delivered the ‘crisis of legitimation’ with the voices of race, poor and LGBTI destabilising feminism. The third and current phase is described by Thornton as ‘knowledge capitalism’ with the filling of the space by corporatisation, the new knowledge economy, new public management, and neoliberalism. ‘New Knowledge,’ it is suggested, now equals ‘useful knowledge’ (p.381). No longer is the pursuit of pure knowledge for knowledge’s sake seen as useful. Rather, like the pure aesthetic experience of a rare flower it is seen as an expensive indulgence, and not for the common people.
A hierarchical militaristic command and control value system, stands in opposition to
democratic civilian notions that embrace the politics of difference in a fragmentary world. The
technoprenurial creation of the neoliberal institution seeks to wash away feminist gains made by the second stage transformation of universities. Thornton (2009) argues the technoprenurial favours the male, ‘they work alone, taking risks and promote the self, unconcerned about collegiality and collective good’ (p.388).
Factors putting pressure on creativity, pleasure and freedom that feed into the current crisis are
numerous. The end of the Cold War, the Arab Spring and the increasing push to so called
democratisation, result in fragmented borders that challenge the traditional state mechanisms
for raising revenue (Becher & Trowler, 2001). Universities become entangled in the vortex
attempting to pursue private funding in an environment of declining and destabilised
government. Driven by continuous improvement and change cycles, they seek to compete in a
5 Under this influence, public universities have morphed from participating in a democratised civil society, to the market. Nation states pursue knowledge production through education which is exploited as a source of wealth. Teaching is concerned with imparting skills to produce
the future clones necessary for continued production and wealth generation for the few. The
information they soak up is used as data to be applied, not as wisdom to advance and improve humankind. Rather the university graduate is now put through a vocational training mill to be work-ready for the conveyor belt of the capitalist state. In this world flowers do not bloom, but rather neat little rows of sameness are produced represented by students as both product - ready to reach the market, and consumers. They exist on the conveyor belt of sameness as equal quality-control tested and credentialed products. The neoliberal world sees new thought as dangerously disruptive, and unity and conformity as essential for this market.
The push for ‘quality’ graduates brings with it a regime of testing instruments and systemised language of accountability and number crunching. Compliance and audit are the dominate
rituals preferencing management and bureaucratic norms over professional, moral and ethical
requirements (Elliott, 2001). The ‘quality’ assurance, however, is only as good as the testing
instrument and its ability to genuinely assess the ‘quality’ of the outcomes. Poorly designed evaluation systems where perceptions mean the highest ratings of teaching are based on the ‘ease of the course’ lead to bad information and bad outcomes (Bansel, Davies, Gannon, & Linnell, 2008). Thus audit is subject to considerable manipulation and questionable construction. The rise of standardised testing and curricula prioritise rote memorisation and regurgitation over critical thinking, a messy and more time consuming process.
Quality assurance testing is sold as a requirement to justify government expenditure of tax payers’ funds and to work as a carrot-type incentive that inspires academics to ensure they produce ‘quality’ graduates. Trust is no longer placed in the academic to be professional in their assessment and grading of the student (Rosser, Johnsrud, & Heck, 2003). Despite all the
literature on good pedagogical practices, time and cost pressures reduce assessment to
standardised and regimental practices involving online multiple choice testing, a written paper
and an exam. Student/clients have expectations of this regimented norm and are likely to
complain if there is deviation. Creative teaching is discouraged in this sterile garden. The large
number of students also reduces the academics own ability to apply creativity, innovation and
critical thinking in their research space, as they have to teach more courses in continuously
6 Despite these concerns the neoliberal transformation of the university has been rapidly adopted by faculty, students and academics. How this has been accepted is a question that has been given little attention. No longer being treated as a professional independent worker, trusted to get the job done with a necessary degree of autonomy, academics experience the loss of respect and correspondingly loose trust in their universities (Groundwater-Smith & Sachs, 2002). The nature of the neoliberal program, placing onus on the individual, leaves many in their isolation feeling unable to respond to the political-economic system that sees a dog-eat-dog survival of the fittest mentality prevail. Collegium in academic deliberations, the sanctum sanatorium of
academic decision making, is removed.
Academic careers are disrupted through casualisation, making the career choice an uncertain
and low level aspiration (Castellóa et al., 2015). The academic given an insecure casualised
employment ensures not only that they lack continuity in professional development as a tertiary educator, but they remain constrained due to their hierarchy of needs, leaving them unlikely to challenge the neoliberal world. Tenure clearly is important in empowering the critical approach
and the dissenting voice (Flaherty, 2016). It is possible, however, that aging academics – those
who would resist, have given up and retired, or taken up consultancies.
Blum & Ullman (2012) describe the neoliberal individual as ‘an entrepreneur of the self’
(p.370) and as such they are responsible for all that befalls them. As noted, the technoprenurial
and neoliberal experience sees a few rising to the demands and being sated as the hero that
academics should all aspire to be, but know they can never quite achieve. In this high pressure
competitive yet constraining environment, the individual is left accounting for their ethical,
physical and mental wellbeing, which excuses the organisation for its own inbuilt institutional
lack of support when wrong outcomes occur. An environment of competition over collegiality
is an undesirable knowledge environment. The intensification in work demands, bureaucratic
audit and managerialism, fosters bullying and other unethical behaviours such as cheating and
plagiarism that grow like weeds and have to be constantly screened for (Hutchinson & Eveline,
2010). Workplace bullying can extend to whole groups and: ‘…can be stimulated by
workgroups or organisations that normalise abusive, or even competitive, behaviour’
(Al-Karim & Parbudyal, 2012 p.585 cited in Baron 2015). Australia ranks sixth out of thirty-one
7 is time to consider Buckminster Fuller’s (2008) suggestion, ‘when the situation does not suit,
one should play in another garden’ (p. 205).
WHAT CAN BE DONE?
What can be done in light of the issues raised in this chapter, and other chapters of this
publication, as the many voices set out the concerns of working in a neoliberal world? Practical
ideas and recommendations, new theory or theory amalgamation, creative, and political
solutions are required. This section invites thought about what tools one can use as possible
strategies to resist and disrupt, to enlarge the creative space, to dream new thoughts and critique existing thoughts? A culture of being continually ‘on’, available and responsive, leaves little opportunity to experience the pleasure in thinking cognitively and deeply as university researchers should. Watson (2010) claims:
…our attention and our relationships are getting atomized…We are in danger of developing a society that is globally connected and collaborative, but one that is also impatient, isolated, and detached from reality. A society that has plenty of answers but very few good questions. A society composed of individuals who are unable to think by themselves in the real world (p.3).
Baron (2009 p.47-52) proposes some practical suggestions that universities could use to help academics thrive. These include promoting collegiality, practising time management strategies – including factoring in free ‘thinking’ time, having realistic expectations, utilising mentoring, having a supportive and alert management, maximising professional autonomy and development of the individual academic . While such tools are important it is at the individuals deeper philosophical and psychological level that real achievement of goals are obtained.
Philosophers provide us with some of the keys to breaking through the many concerns outlined.
8 capacity to act upon our limits – enhancing or negating what we know – giving rise to new and unpredictable thoughts for ourselves. The removal of philosophers and philosophy from universities, along with the intellectual collegial discussion spaces such as philosophy clubs and debating societies, adds to the technoprenuerial sterility depicted by Cordal (Wang, 2015), and the Hayekian (Marginson, 2009) neoliberal notion that ‘[c]omplete intellectual self-understanding is impossible’ (p.95). Heidegger (1959) posed that ‘granted that we cannot do anything with philosophy, might not philosophy, if we concern ourselves with it do something for us’ (p.12). Encouragement of philosophical discussion, and pursuits that engage in healthy debate, will improve the future outlook for universities seeking to distinguish their institution from others by creating a fertile garden for minds to explore in.
The failure to value plurality, difference and a range of views weakens the human’s lifeworld (Hauke, 2000, pp. 152-159). The power of the dissenting voice is mollified in a neoliberal world in which conformity and noncritical thinking are optimised. People who are judged as
highly creative by their peers tend to conform consistently less often to the group’s opinion
than do people judged as less creative (Sternberg & Lubart, 1995, p.229). Heffernan (2011)
claims:
…what we see is significantly determined by what we know those around us see. Some
people can resist this some of the time. Good decision making positively depends on it.
Which is why minority voices are so essential in any group discussion (para. 8).
The outcome of the suppression of dissent is to be seen in political institutions where party enforced unity of voice, has resulted in sudden rupturing leadership spills, instead of gradual changes. Greater rending in the fabric of society, such as the Arab Spring (Morris, 2012), Brexit, and now the Trump Presidency are in response to disjunctions between the claims of democracy and the experience of reality resulting from the long suppression of dissent. The WikiLeaks (2010) and Panama Papers (2016) seek the transparency that democracy claims to rely on, yet fails to provide, as capitalism and neoliberal pursuits support the few, ‘commanders’, in sustaining their power. Academics are looked to, for provision of the critical voice that assesses and proposes new ideas suggesting the way forward, aiding society through these political and social periods of upheaval.
9 individuation deals with the struggle of the inner unconscious, encompassing ‘the infantile,
personal and collective’ at the same time as dealing with the outer world of society (Hauke, 2000, p.169). Jung’s advances in psychological thinking provided the beginning of a concept
of reflexive individuation, a process involving attention to the fragmented self. This however,
is only the beginning as neuroscience becomes the newest way of seeing how the human brain
functions. For instance, the demands of technology such as email, smart phones and the like,
create attention deficits that place the human brain in its most primitive and reactive state: the
limbic brain. This is the antithesis to the demands of learning that require the brain has quiet
space to engage the cortex in deep thinking (Newport, 2016; Sheehan & Pearse, 2015).
Jung’s devotion to the inner life responded to the enlightenment and its drive to power over nature through an internal self-referential loop satisfying utilitarian abstract notions based on rationality and logic. In modern neuroscientific analysis this could be described as bringing the whole brain (including the primitive, emotional and cognitive) together in an acknowledgment that each serves a purpose in the working of the whole. There is little recognition in the academe, of the impact of fear and stress in causing the human brain to act out of primitive survival, diminishing the ability to operate from the cortex, or thinking brain. To be truly free to think from the cortex, engaging the whole brain is essential (Newport, 2016). In the neoliberal controlling environment demanding constant change, the academic’s stress levels diminish their ability to engage in clear thinking, or integrated brain activity. Jung, operating without the benefit of the MRI scan, talked of the self-regulating psyche in which something within us holds a greater awareness than just our conscious self. Jung argued
… in today’s world people are inclined to pursue scientific work for the sake of success … They evaluate their field of study in terms of its future income … Strictly speaking, no science is the least bit useful … until it abandons its exalted status as a goal in itself and sinks to the level of an industry (Jung 1898 cited in Hauke 2000, pp. 36-37).
10 develop new weapons and new strategies, has called for the stepped-up rate of invention’ (cited in Vernon 1970, p.167). It is telling that over six decades later these clarion calls for innovation remain current. Whereas Rodgers, even earlier, in 1940, had identified the need for personal growth and development of the individual in a democratic manner stating,
In education we tend to turn out conformists, stereotypes, individuals whose education is “completed”, rather than freely creative and original thinkers … in the sciences, there is an ample supply of technicians, but the number who can creatively formulate fruitful hypotheses and theories is small indeed (Vernon, 1970, pp.137-8; Pope, 2005).
The desire to pursue a creative vision is what produces pleasurable drivers in an individual that can push the boundaries of knowledge. Baron (2009), discusses the need for a creative life to bring about a ‘thriving’ person while a compliant life requires ‘adaptation and fitting in’ leading to a feeling of futility and that nothing really matters (p.30). One of the toughest factors for
creative people is their environment:
Some environments nurture creativity and others squelch it. …Creativity is in part the
product of an interaction between a person and his or her context. A setting that
stimulates creative ideas, encourages them when presented, and rewards a broad range
of ideas and behaviours will surely foster original and nonconformist thinking.
(Sternberg & Lubart, 1995, pp. 9- 10).
Hence universities urging academics to be creative and innovative within a neoliberal constraining organisation will not succeed. A self-regulating creative person is motivated most strongly from their internal motivators, with the external environment often negatively affecting this motivation: ‘…in a nutshell … extrinsic, motivation is to creativity what
strychnine is to orange juice’ (Sternberg & Lubart, 1995, p. 238). However, Amabile (1988)
has suggested that it is a little more nuanced. Extrinsic, in the absence of intrinsic motivation,
can undermine creativity, extrinsic combined with intrinsic motivation may, however, improve
creativity. The indication is that intrinsic motivators are important in the initial and idea
formulating stages. Extrinsic motivation can become more relevant during the labour stage in
bringing a creative idea to fruition (Amabile, 1988 cited in Sternberg & Lubart, 1995, p. 243).
11 external drivers whip them to do more for students, and produce more research, overloading their ability to become the person they are. Creativity requires mindfulness in producing ideas that do not always have to show immediate application. This pursuit is essential to the development of humankind. To become the 2015 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, Professor
Paul Modrich noted that his tenured professorial position and the freedom that gave him
‘helped him to pursue “curiosity-based research” with no guarantee of returns’ (Flaherty,
2016).
Resistance requires effort to maintain and strengthen freedom and to avoid being trapped in the
binary dimension (Rowland 2002, p. 127). Heath and Burdon (2013) argue for a power that
frees academic agency in opposition to neoliberalism. Bauman (2001) argues that democracy
needs a questioning culture to
…keep the forever unexhausted and unfulfilled human potential open, fighting back all
attempts to foreclose and pre-empt the further unravelling of human possibilities,
prodding human society to go on questioning itself and preventing that questioning
from ever stalling or being declared finished (p.4 cited in Giroux 2005, p. 216).
The postmodern contests the ideal of fixed narratives that knowledge is a stable of conscious
rational belief and humans consist of binary gendered opposites such as male/female (Rowland,
2002). The drive to conformity relies on hegemonic exclusion over inclusivity, whereas a
politics of difference addresses dislike of physical differences, different ideas, thinking and
approaches (Paull, Omari, Standen, 2015). In discussing the politics of difference, Young
(1986; 2011) identifies the possibility of an ‘openness to unassimilated otherness’ (1986,
p.301). Young’s likening of the ‘unoppressive city’ as a model that encompasses a social
relations among strangers, a place of excitement and possibilities, that ‘welcome anonymity
and some measure of freedom’ (1986, p.317) could easily be adopted as a model for a healthy
university. Such a model evokes the thriving jungle promising much more than a neat row of
cultivated sterile blossoms.
It is for each individual to find who inspires their own path of individuation. Jung through the
idea of the unknowable unconscious loosens the nature of scientific empiricism. He provides
inspiration for the seeker of creative pleasure by the use of alchemical references as metaphor
for this mystical process. If not Jung then others such as Deleuze and Guattari’s ([1972] 1982)
12 the conscious and unconscious, linking this to a politicisation of the psyche. Instead they speak
of a continuous becoming and offer the rhizome, like a tuber that can sprout from any part of
its surface, spreading in an underground manner as a creative power that invites perceptions of
labyrinthine subterranean creative energies (Deleuze & Guattari, [1980] 1988). Perhaps Jung’s
(1967) description of Joyce’s Ulysses encapsulates this idea of the continuous whole as human
becoming’s: ‘It not only begins and ends in nothingness, it consists of nothing but nothingness.
It is all infernally nugatory. As a piece of technical virtuosity it is a brilliant and hellish
monster-birth’ (p.110). Cixous (1996) contests the use of culturally structured notions of gender
objecting to the binary of male and female as hierarchical and limiting. Instead she draws on
the idea of ‘other’ as an unknowable creative source.
Cixous’ contribution to creativity brings a call to think inventively and differently from the
patriarchal hierarchy of a binary world view (Cixous & Clément, 1996). After all, women have
suffered through lack of autonomy and the restrictions of unifying conformity across historical periods. Cixous (1997) invokes women to resist the unifying objectivity imposed on women,
and to celebrate. The isolated madness of women suppressed in their inability to express their
individuated self can find release. As Alexander (2004) argues Cixous suggests ‘…by
expressing the self and transgressing fixed lines … woman rebels against passivity forced on
her literally, economically, emotionally, and physically’ (p.5). Cixous (1997) entreats woman
to:
…continue to look inside the self … to give the world artistry, as a mother of the
creative world, whether literally or metaphorically; woman serves as her own
inspiration…. no longer a commodity in a masculine economy but creative of “life,
thought, [and] transformation” (p.893).
Feminist writers therefore provide another possibility to inspire pushback against neoliberal tendencies through resistance theory. Howson, Coate, & Croix (2015) support Thornton’s (2012) assertion of the re-masculinisation of universities. Hostility to women invading
perceived male domains still occurs (Baron, 2015).Empirical studies of gendered bullying and
discrimination in masculine dominated cultures shows ‘aggressive, dominant behaviours’ are
rewarded (Omari, 2010). Recognition that women should not carry the burden of
13 good work in any of the university domains provides another form of resistance. Relational mentoring programs are a meaningful tool for encouraging this human dimension of support and nurture.
The underlying values of the collective, or Weltanschauung (world-view), change in response
to the knowledge of the period (Jung, 2015). A change in direction for researchers and
educators is required given the pressure of dying (natural) environments. The move towards
considering quality of life, means people are disenchanted with Huntingtonian military values
and Hayekian neoliberalism, such as honour, power, wealth, and fame (Storr, 1973, pp. 86-87).
Klein’s (2015) admonishment to abandon the core free market ideology, restructure the global economy, and remake our political systems suggest the current ideology is no longer an option. Instead knowledge for humanity is required as climate crisis challenges us to either embrace radically new ways of being or suffer the consequences. In other words the garden bed is ripe for a radical overhaul and new landscaping.
The inexplicable dimension of the human makes the certainty of science uncertain and
challenges Hayek’s claim that everything is already known. Rather than the heroic
technoprenuer each individual is on their own heroic journey, seeking pleasure, be it through
individuation, creativity, and/or resistance. Finding spaces within the university environment,
little jungles that enable support, nurture and incubation of creativity is essential in allowing
this process to bloom.
Baron (2009) suggests feelings of wellbeing are supported by having a social environment in which leadership provides a warm, empathetic and attending aspect encouraging academics to feel part of a collegial group who are free to communicate and participate in a non-threatening, non-competitive, and a non-audit focused atmosphere. A meeting group for Post Graduate and Early Career Researchers is an example of a safe social environment providing space for reflection and flowering. This meeting space is loosely based on a community of practice approach. The concept of a ‘community of practice’ (CoP) (Lave, 1982; Wenger, 1998) has blossomed in academia as it provides a safe and creative refuge for like-minded members sharing common interests or purposes.
The community of practice (CoP) is an example of one possibility for a space that can foster
self-14 organising enterprise of individuals grappling with unmet needs or common problems. They
provide an environment in which support and fostering of creative inspiration can improve and
encourage the academics exploration and grow, both in their teaching and research. CoPs
beauty can be their independence from the organisational university structure enabling freedom
in their informal enterprise (Becher & Parry, 2005). This provides a space to test new ideas and
new approaches outside of official spaces. The CoP provides both an acknowledged and a
subversive role that can provide opportunity to permit some of Nietzsche’s disruptive wisdom.
A CoP can also break down the risk of dominance by elite’s helping overcome the bullying
syndrome. Bourdieu (1979/1984) has argued that social positions develop within fields, and
become a means of enabling attribution of status that distances undesirable socio-economic
identities (Taylor, 2015, p. 20). The modes of perception of elites can then be imposed on
dominated groups, in what Bourdieu argues (1990), is a symbolic violence. Awareness of the
practices of elitism and bullying enable academics to resist the dominant social capital and
create their own participatory democratic flat structures through such mechanisms as CoPs,
mentoring, or providing another garden in which to play.
CONCLUSION
Giroux (2005) suggests a moral responsibility exists for both the condition for politics and
agency to recognise the importance of becoming accountable for others through their ideas,
language, and actions in a struggle between hope and despair. These are real questions for
academics to contemplate, embrace and enact their resistance.
Young, (1986) proposes in her outline of the politics of difference an embracing of the diversity
that abounds in society. Creating a jungle of exciting possibilities. Like the modern city, in
which humans interact, or not, on their own terms finding empowerment and support that suits
their needs. Universities could do well to embrace the exciting mix of different possibilities.
15 education’ (p.2). Some argue that academics are motivated to resist the pressures because they
are capable critical thinkers (Anderson, 2008). However, others suggest there is little evidence
of this with academics seemingly accepting the changes or else leaving academia altogether
(Heath & Burdon, 2013). Both present a bleak outlook.
It becomes the duty of academics to avoid these unhappy outcomes and sustain the substantive purpose of ensuring the university provides a future for knowledge, learning, education and research that is not destroyed by a questionable audit system of control and commercial interests alone. More space for creativity and acceptance of the critical dissenting voice is called for. Academics with these abilities will inevitably seek out these spaces where they can flourish.
Opportunities for resistance, dissenting stances and openness to difference provide academics
with possibilities to ensure they fulfil their lives. Academics should reflect and determine what
they want. Should they be content in the corporatised university or should they resist the pressures and seek pleasure that satisfies their self-fulfilment? Practical examples, like a
community of practice or mentoring programs embrace the lifeworld. Using reflexivity,
mindfulness, the path of individuation, the knowledge given to us by the new field of
neuroscience, together with psychology and philosophy, all help the academic stay on track in
a fulfilling life. Mindfulness in maintaining the academe as ‘profession’ over the academe as
‘business’ is essential in this reclaiming of space. Reducing the militarisation, regimentation
and commodification of the university will enable an environment that can incubate a profusion
of blossoming creativities in a co-creative space ripe for intellectual cross fertilisation; a
veritable jungle of colour, perfume and beauty.
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